Intelligence Over Centuries is a sweeping journey through spycraft over the ages — from the time Moses sent out the Twelve Spies to find out more about the Promised Land to the secret messages covered in wax that led to the defeat of Xerxes of Persia by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis; from what the Arthashastra and Thirukkural say about espionage to Sun Tzu’s advice about getting “other men” to find out about the enemy rather than depend on “spirits”; and from the intelligence set-up of Chhattrapati Shivaji to the evolution of modern day agencies including the Intelligence Bureau and R&AW. Vappala Balachandran, a former IPS officer of the Maharashtra cadre who spent 19 years at R&AW before retiring as special secretary in 1995, brings all this together in a moderately-sized volume that also includes anecdotes from his own career and personal reflections. The term “intelligence failure” is often used loosely, Balachandran says — what really happens is a failure to turn raw intelligence into actionable policy through “an alchemic process of collation, analysis, dissemination, arbitration, policy adjudication and decision-making”. Gaps in this process “would lead to a situation in which intelligence, including technical pointers already available.with any wing of a government does not result in policy or action”. India’s own such failures are many and well known. In the list drawn up by the author, who was in the two-member committee that examined the police response to the 26/11 terror attacks, is the Rajghat attack of October 2, 1986. Specific prior intelligence had been disseminated to the IB, Delhi Police, and Special Protection Group, but each had “digested” the information in a silo — Delhi Police had pasted an alert on their notice board. Co-ordinated action was absent, and it was just good fortune that the attacker, who hid in a tree and fired at the assemblage of the country’s leadership from a pellet gun, did not have access to a more sophisticated firearm. Five years later, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination could not be prevented as no one had processed the available technical pointers into actionable intelligence. “Intelligence agencies were lulled into a belief that all was well as long as the machinery for collection of Technical Intelligence was functioning. None cared to process the raw product into actionable intelligence,” Balachandran writes. The deadly Easter attack of 2019 was not the only time that the Sri Lankan security set up had ignored specific intelligence leads from India. Balachandran discloses that in 1994, R&AW had passed on information about an LTTE plan to eliminate then UNP leader Gamini Dissanayake during the presidential election campaign of that year. The lead was ignored, and the UNP is yet to recover from its three-decade old leadership loss. A chapter on “most famous spies” brings back the 1980s, which, as the author puts it, was “India’s decade of spies” — Coomar Narain, the Larkins brothers, and K V Unnikrishnan, the CIA mole in R&AW (though the writer does not refer to him by name), who was feeding India’s plans in Sri Lanka to the Americans after being “honey-trapped”. The detailed discussion on covert operations has many examples from the world, but shies away from anything that India has done in this department — it does not, for example, make any mention of Kulbhushan Jadhav. Balachandran also raises an interesting question: is intelligence gathering by professionals required at all? In his opinion, no Indian Prime Minister has felt the need for intelligence agencies to guide their policies. Nehru would brief the IB chief about foreign developments (there was no R&AW then); Indira Gandhi did not trust the IB, which she thought was too focussed, due to its colonial roots, on communists instead of communalism, and “just about tolerated” R&AW; and Morarji Desai sat through briefings bored stiff. Title: Intelligence Over Centuries Author: Vappala Balachandran Publisher: Indus Source Books Pages: 306 Price: Rs 799 Explained Books appears every Saturday. It summarises the core argument of an important work of non-fiction.
